• Oh dear…

    I am seriously embarrassed that Microsoft produced this video 🙁 And I am scheduled to attend PDC08 🙁

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  • What happened to MEST? Why are we talking about the Web?

    Bill de h ra made a comment on Stefan Tilkov‘s post about our “How to GET a Cup of Coffee” article… Q205: “I feel that I have learned a lot from the discussions with the REST folks and together with Jim we hope to move that understanding forward to service-oriented computing with our upcoming MEST paper.”…

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  • “How to GET a Cup of Coffee”

    My “web book” co-authors (Jim and Ian) and I worked on a fun article for InfoQ about how Web technologies could be used to support a “cup of coffee ordering” scenario. It was really fun working on the article and I am pleased with the ideas conveyed. Your comments/feedback are more than welcome! “How to…

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  • “Microsoft SQL Server Data Mining Services”

    Our own Dan Fay (eScience blog) has a great post about data mining services in the cloud. “So for fun – I downloaded a csv file of a stream gauge near Redmond into Excel and ran the “Highlight Exceptions” tool to find outliers in the dataset – it read the table, uploaded it to the…

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  • “I’m a PC” ad campaign

    After all the buzz about the Seinfeld ads, Microsoft announced the “I’m a PC” campaign. Clever me finds. Finally, something creative from Microsoft. I’ve said in the past how much I love the Apple ads (not just the “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” ones but everything that Apple does. It’s funny how people get…

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  • On advertising (that new Microsoft ad everyone is talking about)

    I must admit, I do love the “I am a Mac, I am PC”, as I’ve said a number of times on this blog. When Microsoft announced that they were investing $300M on a campaign, I hoped that something good would come out. Well, the first ad has now been released and everyone is talking…

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  • Travel blog: A week in Greece

    And what a week has been! Lots of food, meeting friends, traveling around, and even been productive with work (i.e. no meetings!!! 🙂 I am now back in Xanthi and at my family’s home in Petinos (3.5km outside of Xanthi). I’ll continue working from here with a focus on the Web book. I am planning…

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  • My online identity… change it or keep the current one?

    When the .name top-level domain name became available, I thought that I would make use of it for all my online identity needs for the rest of my life, so I purchased the savas.parastatidis.name domain. My personal email has been savas@parastatidis.name since then while my web/blog presence is located at http://savas.parastatidis.name. After a change in…

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  • Freebase Parallax

    This is a break from my “travel blogging” 🙂 I just watched the video of the “Freebase Parallax” browsing interface demo. Really really cool. It’s the power of semantics!!! Freebase Parallax.

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  • Photos: Zurich airport at sunset and after the rain, Greek food!

    So, I arrived in Greece and it’s already been fantastic. After a long trip that saw me waiting at Heathrow for 6 hours, at Zurich airport for 3, I finally arrived in Thessaloniki. My friend Kostas picked me up from the airport at 2am and drove me to Xanthi but not before we stopped to…

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